Forget bottled water; tap water is just as good! Pour it into a reusable water bottle, and always have fresh water on the go without wasting plastic.
– Ashlan Gorse Cousteau, American entertainment journalist.
What I have been noticing over the last few years is that people fall for scams very easily, especially if you position the scam as something you are doing for ‘the good of the Earth’ and to ‘help the environment’.
This way they get people to accept the inconvenience and self-regulate themselves or others based on the propaganda of the moment. All the while allowing rich corporations to get poor people to pay more unnecessarily without questioning the underlying lack of ethics behind the whole agenda.
The whole country paying 20 and now, 50 sen in some places, for plastic bags to carry products that you buy at malls and grocery stores is number one on my list of scams. This was started in Selangor and of course is enthusiastically embraced by all stores because well, they get to sell more, but there is no logic in this when everything else you buy comes wrapped in plastic.
You go to a grocery store. Almost everything you buy from the supermarket is packaged in plastic. Your vegetables, your meats, your mineral water, your bread, your toiletries, your juices, your bedsheets, your phones and gadgets, think about it … just about everything.
When your government does not have the political will to tell large manufacturers to package in anything else but plastic, why are you the victim who has to fork out 20 sen to 50 sen PER plastic bag every time you spend money buying these products?
You have no choice but to buy these products because you can’t grow your vegetables, you don’t filter your water from your streams, you don’t butcher your cows and pigs, you don’t manufacture your textiles and bedsheets, you don’t make your phones, cables and electricity gadgets, you just are the end user, the consumer.
If plastic were that bad, and there is a genuine war against plastics that the government is serious about, then why not demand that all these products be packaged in any other material BUT plastic?
Why burden the consumer and give an impression that the consumer is causing environmental damage by putting all the products they buy in a plastic bag?
Now, you can buy a mountain of products and the cashier who used to put all these products in plastic bags that carry the supermarket’s brand now just shrug their shoulders and tell you to pay 50 sen more for that same cheap plastic bag or buy a RM5 bag that says “I am an Earth ambassador” to carry it back home.
The gullible probably feel great about themselves doing this. I just want to regurgitate the hypocrisy that is being shoved down our throats and the double standards being practised by the government that allows manufacturers to choose whichever packaging suits them, that is cheaper and better for them. Then make the small people pay to just carry these products back home while telling them they are helping the environment by paying for these plastics.
I remember a time when all drinks were in glasses. All drinks are in plastic bottles now. Why are we not returning to that? Not enough political will to make that happen?
I remember a time when public places had lots and lots of water spouting fountains so that people could drink water openly whenever they were thirsty. After all, isn’t clean water a fundamental right a government that collects taxes from its citizens gives its people?
But no, we don’t see that anymore. If you want water, you go buy it in plastic bottles now. Why are we not returning to multitudes of water fountains? Not enough political will to make that happen?
Even when it is well-researched that people who drink from plastic water bottles consume nearly 90,000 additional microplastics compared to drinking from glass, ceramic, stainless steel, copper or just about any other option but plastic. The government cannot possibly not know about this, but allow millions of plastic water bottles to fill the store, while removing free avenues of water drinking from public water fountains, thus increasing disease and death in people.
The bottling of drinking water in plastic is a growing industry projected to have reached USD334 billion in 2023.
Nestle, Danone, Pepsi-Co, Coca-Cola, Bisleri International, and Gerolsteiner Brunnen are some of the biggest manufacturers of drinking water sold in plastic bottles globally.
In a study of 259 bottles from nine brands of water bottles in plastics done by Orb Media highlighted by Forbes Statista, they all had an average of 325 plastic particles for every litre of water sold.
Nestle has the highest number of concentration of plastic particles at a concentration of 6 – 10,390 plastic particles per litre of bottled water. Plastics discovered were polypropylene, nylon and Polyethylene terephthalate.
If this is being allowed, why are plastic straws banned; where is the logic?
The ban on plastic straws forces us to use silly paper straws that disintegrate as you sip water from glass mugs in restaurants.
But billions and billions of plastic water bottles are produced daily. Which do you think fills the waterways and landfills with more volume, plastic bottles or plastic straws?
Propaganda makes people believe drinking from plastic water bottles is safer, though research shows it is slowly killing people.
But that is OK. All we need to do is pay 50 sen for a plastic bag to carry these plastic poisons in, and somehow, we are ambassadors of the environment, and we are saving the planet.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
